Category: General

“[Luis von Ahn – inventor of the captcha] says that about 200M captchas are typed every day. He was proud of that until he realized it takes about 10 seconds to type them, so his invention is wasting 500,000 hours per day.”- David Weinberger

I wonder if Samuel Segal feels similarily.

“…all lenses distort and shape ‘reality’ to some degree.” – Mark Woods

Dave Slusher’s clambake from April 6 2009 accompanied me on my between meeting drives today.

Yes, you read that correct – 2009.

A podcast he recorded more than a year ago.

It’s a great listen. He discusses how the people publishing to services like Twitter don’t own their own words. The company does. And the company – rather than the community – decides on the direction to take the service. Offline – there’s even a name for this type of arrangement.

“…Croppers were assigned a plot of land to work, and in exchange owed the owner a share of the crop at the end of the season, usually one-half. The owner provided the tools and farm animals…”

Following that thread, Dave works through the burn out of being on the receiving end of a firehose of continuous ephemera – for a year. Or longer. And how publishing tiny bits continuously hampers publishing bigger, more substantial bits.

Dave also includes a cover of Daniel Johnston’s ‘Walking the Cow’ by Kathy McCarty. It’s a song fIREHOSE introduced me to. Mike Watt‘s ambling bass line has an immediate calming effect on me – not unlike disconnecting from the real-time stream.

It’s one of my all time favorite clambakes. Thanks Dave.

the title of this post references an even earlier Evil Genius Chronicle

“But imagine an incident far more disruptive and deadly when we really needed to move masses of people quickly. The major transportation and travel institutions that would do the mass movement of people seem to be woefully unprepared and unable to scale up quickly” – David Weinberger

Ironic given the internet’s origins as a national defense project.

Though, the same problem exists with our nation’s highway system.

Back in art school – I built a table that fell apart when anything was placed on it. No, that project was not funded by DARPA.

“How you decide to communicate is a fundamental choice in the creation of the most prosperous economy your life can provide” – Tyler Cowen, ‘Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World’

‘Copying Is Not Theft’ released by QuestionCopyright.org

Download your copy from archive.org

I see copyright (ownership) & licensing (usage) as 2 separate issues and think a we’d all be better off if more things were placed under the Published April 15, 2010

“…in order for a cap and trade scheme or a carbon tax to yield significant declines in our consumption of hydrocarbon fuels, policies would have to be geared to push the price of oil to at least $100/bbl. Meanwhile, however, our economy has done a tremendous job of becoming more energy efficient…” – Scott Grannis

“YouTube is behaving like a television network and not like a tube for you.” – Christian Sandvig

‘View Source’ was responsible for the hockey-stick growth of past 10 years of the web.

‘Download Source’ will be responsible for it’s hockey-stick growth in the next 15 years.